AP® UNITED STATES HISTORY
2008 SCORING GUIDELINES
Question 3 Information List
The Market Revolution—General Impact
• Decline of subsistence agriculture
• The “transportation revolution”: spreading networks of turnpikes, roads, canals, and railroads
o National or Cumberland Road (1811, completed in 1852)
o Erie Canal (1825, 364 miles—Albany to Buffalo)
• The steamboat; Robert Fulton
• Impact of the War of 1812
• Henry Clay’s American System
o Second National Bank, 1817
o Tariff of 1816
o Internal improvements
• Emergence of new markets in land, labor, and produce
• “Mixed enterprise” financial system; New York Stock Exchange, 1817
• American system of manufacturing: low-cost, standardized mass production, built around interchangeable parts (Eli Whitney) produced by machines
• Increased economic instability: Panics of 1819, 1833, 1837, and 1857
• Rise of new working class: trade unions
• Conflicts between sections: capitalist forms of labor and market agriculture in North, slave-based order in South
• Conflicts within each section: entrepreneurs and wage earners, masters and slaves, planters and yeomen
• Second Bank of the United States
o “BankWar,” 1832
o Specie Circular, 1836
• Inventions: (1800, 306 patents; 1860, 28,000 patents)
o Samuel F. B. Morse (telegraph, 1849)
o Elias Howe (sewing machine, 1846; perfected by Singer)
o John Deere (steel plow, 1837)
o Cyrus McCormick (mechanical mower-reaper, 1830s)
o By 1840s: high-pressure steam engine
• Population: 5.3 million in 1800 increases to more than 23 million in 1850; urban population quadruples from 1800 to 1840
• Immigration: 1840 to 1860, 4.2 million immigrants (mostly Irish 1845-46 [potato blight], 1.5 million); four out of five settled in the Northeast
• Women removed from production of goods, leading to “cult of domesticity”
Impact of the Market Revolution—the Northeast
• Eastern urban capitalists dramatically accelerated pace of economic change: growth of regional and interregional markets; expanded credit and financing resources; some order imposed on currency and banking; hastened erosion of old artisan handicraft system and rise of new manufacturing enterprises.
• Industrial growth, particularly rise of textile mills in New England
• Newly created wealth controlled by tiny proportion of population
• Decline of household production and apprenticeships
• Growing impersonality of economic relationships
• New classes of independent and dependent Americans (artisans and journeymen)
• Samuel Slater
• Eli Whitney (interchangeable parts—guns, clocks)
• Putting-out system
• Boston Associates (founded 1813; by 1836 included eight companies with 6,000 workers)
o Francis Cabot Lowell
o Boston Manufacturing Company
o Lowell System
• Waltham system: “Lowell Girls”
• Lowell, Massachusetts: the United States’ first large-scale planned manufacturing city (strikes in 1834 and 1836)
• National Trade Union
• Elias Howe (sewing machine)
• “Wage slaves”
• Spreading canal and railroad networks
• Erie Canal (completed 1825); Dewitt Clinton, “Clinton Ditch,” “Canal Age”
• Increased German and Irish immigration (rise in nativism)
• New York is the nation’s largest city
Impact of the Market Revolution—the Midwest
• Increase in westward migration
• Spreading canal and railroad networks linked to the Northeast
• Increase in cash-crop production
• New classes of independent and dependent Americans
• Commercialization of agriculture in the Midwest contributes to the growth of eastern manufacturing
• Pittsburgh first to develop a manufacturing sector to complement its exchange function
• Cincinnati “porkopolis” (third largest industrial center by 1840)
• Growth of Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee (populations increase twenty-fivefold between 1830 and 1850)
• The National or Cumberland Road
• Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
• John Deere (steel plow)
• McCormick Reaper (patented in 1834; plant produced 80,000 reapers by 1860)
Impact of the Market Revolution—the South
• Lagged behind in industrialization and urbanization, although from 1840 to 1860 South’s economy grew slightly faster than the North’s economy
• Rise of Cotton Kingdom
• Eli Whitney (cotton gin)
• Corn was a large crop, but “King Cotton” was the largest cash crop (short staple cotton)
• New Cotton Kingdom (world cotton production grows from 9 percent in 1800 to 68 percent in 1850; in 1800, 73,000 bales; in 1850, 2 million bales)
• Westward expansion of plantation slavery; “Alabama Fever”
• Rise of southern yeomanry
• “Tariff of Abominations,” 1828
• Nullification Crisis, 1832-33
• Rise of New Orleans and Charleston
• Steamboats on the Mississippi
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